Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [61]
Wilson’s casual attitude alarmed even his supporters. Fortunately, perhaps, there were several detailed plans floating about. As the war had dragged on, it had inevitably provoked much discussion about ways to forestall conflict. In the United States, the League to Enforce Peace brought Democrats and Republicans together. In Britain, a League of Nations Society drew a respectable middle-class, liberal membership. To their left, the Fabians sponsored a full-scale study of the matter by Leonard Woolf. At the beginning of 1918, the French and British governments decided that they had better get in on the act since, thanks to Wilson, a League of Nations was now an explicit Allied war aim. In France a commission under the prominent liberal statesman Léon Bourgeois drew up an elaborate scheme for an international organization with its own army. In Britain a special committee under a distinguished lawyer, Sir Walter Phillimore, produced a detailed set of recommendations that incorporated many of the prewar ideas on, for example, compulsory arbitration of disputes. Its approach was cautious, rejecting both utopian ideas of a world federation and the pragmatic suggestion that a league should be merely a continuation of the wartime alliance. When the British government sent him a copy of the Phillimore report, Wilson said unhelpfully that he found it disappointing and that he was working on his own scheme, which he would unveil in due course. His main principles, he allowed the British to learn, were two: “There must be a League of Nations and this must be virile, a reality, not a paper League.” The war ended with no more definite word than that from Washington.9
It was at this point that one of the luminaries of the British empire decided to try his hand at drafting a scheme. Thin, with hard blue eyes, General Jan Smuts, the South African foreign minister, was not particularly imposing at first glance. (In London, Borden’s secretary thought he had come to fix the electric light and curtly told him to wait outside.) He had, however, precisely the sort of personal qualities to appeal to Wilson, because they were so much like his own: a fondness for dealing with the great questions, deep religious and ethical convictions, and a desire to make the world a better place. Both men had grown up in stable, happy families in small communities, Wilson in the American South, Smuts in the settled Boer farming community of the Cape. Both had fond memories of happy black servants (although both doubted that blacks would ever be the equals of whites) and unhappy memories of war, civil in Wilson’s case and Boers against the British in Smuts’s. Both were sober and restrained on the surface, passionate and sensitive underneath. Both combined vast self-righteousness with huge ambition. Both were quick to see the inconsistencies in others while remaining blind to their own. 10
Smuts sailed through school and Stellenbosch University and then, like many bright young men from the colonies, headed off to England. At Cambridge he worked assiduously, collecting prizes and a double first in law. In London, where he prepared for the bar, he never, as far as is known, visited a play or a concert or an art gallery. In his limited spare time he read poetry: Shelley, Shakespeare, but above all Walt Whitman, whose deep love of nature he shared. If Wilson could inspire his audience with his sober prose, if Lloyd George could lift them up with his golden speeches, Smuts could, above all the other peacemakers, sing to them.11 Smuts had advised on the great issues of the war; it was natural that he would also advise on the peace.
Smuts had greeted Wilson’s appearance on the world stage with enthusiasm. “It is this moral idealism and this vision of a better world which has up-borne us through the dark night of this war,” he told a group of American newspapermen. The world was shattered but there now lay before it a gigantic opportunity. “It is for us to labour in the remaking of that world to better ends,